ART REVIEW; A Cornucopia of Cultural Exchange, Beginning With a Martial Arts Hero

Looking at ''Black Belt'' at the Studio Museum in Harlem is like watching whiplash in slow motion. The head is moving all over the place, but the body is left behind.

The show, which has been organized by Christine Y. Kim, the museum's assistant curator, puts the museum on a new course. Taking the martial arts paragon Bruce Lee as its point of departure, it sets out to examine the cross-cultural influences to be found in the work of Asian and African-American artists, and thus several of the show's 19 artists are of Asian or Asian-American descent. This is a radical shift for a museum that began as a showcase for African-American contemporary art and more recently expanded its scope to include artists from Africa and the worldwide African diaspora. It recognizes the increasingly blurred lines of racial difference and should continue the revitalization of the Studio Museum that began with the arrival of Lowery Stokes Sims, its director, and Thelma Golden, its deputy director for exhibitions and programs.

In the foreword to the catalog, Ms. Sims writes that the show reflects ''the shrinking world and the effects of multiculturalism on popular culture and art practice.''

Yet ''Black Belt'' itself represents a retreat for contemporary art and artists. With a few notable exceptions, the work on view here reflects the simplistic ways in which notions of identity and cultural difference are exploited in the name of art these days, used as shortcuts to theoretically correct appropriations of popular culture.

Most of the work on view operates with such an unambitious notion of art's potential as to all but fail the basic requirements of the discipline, miring the show in artistic academicism and literal-mindedness. You know you are in trouble when three artists in a show appropriate the same scene from a movie and do almost nothing with it, i.e., simply splice it with other appropriated video, turn it into a video game or re-enact it, also on video. The scene is Lee's fight with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the finale of his 1978 movie ''Game of Death.'' There has to be more to cross-fertilization than this.

Since there is probably no such thing as a pure, un-cross-fertilized culture, any attempt to illuminate the workings of cross-fertilization -- past or present -- has immense possibility. The catalog conveys this intention in fairly interesting, although mostly autobiographical and sociological, terms.

In a roundtable discussion that serves as the catalog's main essay, Ms. Kim talks about her fascination with the year 1974 -- when she was 2 years old and Lee was becoming popular. Wielding fashionable buzzwords and concepts, her roundtable colleagues roam the intellectual landscape and also discuss the importance of Lee's movie persona as the first Asian in American movies who was prominently neither a victim nor a villain.

Trained in the martial arts and a devotee of Taoism, Lee merged his film and real-life character in a philosophy of dedication and concern for others in which violence was only a last resort. Of course, his movies placed him in an endless assortment of last-resort situations, but his creed in many ways made him more than just an action hero. (One of his books is included in the exhibition's reading area.)

The catalog also has writing by Vija Prashad, director of the international studies program at Trinity College in Hartford, and Latasha Natasha Nevada Diggs, a poet and the lead electronic vocalist for the jam band Yohimbe Brothers. Their essays, respectively titled ''Kung Fusion: Organize the 'Hood Under I-Ching Banners'' and 'The Black Asianphile,'' are well worth reading for their appreciation and explication of the Bruce Lee phenomenon in all its complexities. These include the influence of his films, but also his larger significance as a social rebel, sex symbol and exemplar of racial consciousness and pride.

But there is almost no discussion in the catalog of the art in the exhibition, and it is easy to see why. Most of the work is incredibly thin, a brittle fusion of conceptual appropriation and installation art.

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Yet whether the artists reprogram scenes of Lee dispatching a queue of opponents so that it resembles a hand-drawn cartoon, as Glenn Kaino does; or juxtapose his image with that of Jackson Pollock in a Warholesque silkscreen-painting, as David Diao does; or print Lee's maxims on pieces of wood that could be sundered with a well-placed karate chop, as Cynthia Wiggins does, they are mostly refurbishing familiar artistic strategies with slightly different cultural references.

Some of the weakest work dates from 2003, raising the suggestion that it was made with the show in mind. Patty Chang's re-enactment of the Lee-Abdul-Jabbar battle is far below the level of her incendiary body-art videos. Luis Gispert's sound installation is festivalistic fun, but not nearly as good as his video installation in the current group show organized by David Rimanelli at Deitch Projects in SoHo.

And whether the work came before or after the show's idea, it doesn't often bring out the best in an artist. David Hammons is represented by a weak piece, a gong with a target configuration. Sanford Biggers, looping pairs of Chinese slippers over some wire strung across the gallery, also seems to be doing a weak version of Mr. Hammons's work. Iona Rozeal Brown's jaunty mix of Chinese court portraiture and hip-hop attitude is a similarly obvious hybrid, but at least she is using her imagination, making something and getting some visual punch for her efforts.

Four exceptions make the show worth seeing. Ellen Gallagher's strange little film loops, which animate some of the little faces and figures from her paintings, are a promising excursion into a new medium for the artist.

So is ''Chasing Dragons,'' a short video by the sculptor Michael Joo that distorts and then gradually reconstitutes a brief scene from the 1980 documentary ''Rude Boy.'' It shows Topper Headon, the Bruce Lee-obsessed drummer for the Clash, wearing his hero's signature yellow jogging suit and punching a punching bag and then a friend. But mainly it makes you think that Mr. Joo is getting good results from studying early 1970's film video (possibly those by Michael Snow and Joan Jonas).

David Huffman's paintings of black astronauts and action figures drifting in surfaces of soft, smoky plumes and swirls suggest a familiarity with Chinese landscape painting and supply one of the show's few sensuous moments.

Best of all is Paul Pfeiffer's 20-second miniature video of Michael Jackson doing his famous moonwalk. Mr. Pfeiffer has manipulated Mr. Jackson's image into a headless creature of bristling symmetry. Titled ''Live Evil,'' it suggests a kind of weapon-twirling Kabuki cyborg or a Cubist bodhisattva and is superbly cross-cultural and in a visual, instantly accessible manner. It is the only work here to do justice to Mr. Lee's savage elegance with a form that it can call its own.

In trying to track a segment of the pervasive process of cultural cross-fertilization that is basic to life in this country, this exhibition, like the artists in it, readily accepts all sorts of artistic stereotypes and received ideas and styles. Changing the cultural references isn't enough. It makes art a form of political cartoon: pointed and amusing but completely ephemeral and topical. But most important, it is not actually personal. This is the ultimate irony of ''Black Belt.'' The impersonal and the generic win. Genuine identity, that uncontrollable mixture of culture, sensibility, personal history and character, has gone missing, and art can't afford to be without it.

''Black Belt'' remains on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street, (212) 864-4500, through Jan. 4.

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A version of this review appears in print on November 28, 2003, on Page E00047 of the National edition with the headline: ART REVIEW; A Cornucopia of Cultural Exchange, Beginning With a Martial Arts Hero. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe